Yakuza

i'm gonna have to play Like a Dragon again before this drops in a futile effort to remember all the plots twists i'll inevitably keep forgetting

- chocolate business
- the power of friendship
- coin locker baby
- sticky tissue disposal
- failed punch perm

They were missing the classic Yakuza trope “secretly Chinese” but more then made up for it with HE COULD WALK ALL ALONG

they nearly went with "secretly Korean" tho iirc

also in every Yakuza ever: "the bad and hated Omi Alliance"

Yeah Secretly Korean is up there but I think Secretly Chinese has more lineage. Did you ever watch classic C4 series Utopia? If so the reveal that Anya isn’t Russian in the last episode of s1 made me SHRIEK irl. I’m such a sucker for these sloppy plot points.

i haven't seen it but i read the spoiler anyway :D

- ambiguously gay
- unambiguously gay, actually played entirely seriously (this applies to antagonists in at least two games)
- does Kiryu know how to use his dick? He seems very naive
- cut to shot outside love hotel yes

xp it’s pure magic, she’s this minor helpless Russian woman in the other episodes and then in e6 she drops the accent in a key scene and is actually a posh English woman - history’s true villains as we know - and there’s absolutely no hint of it beforehand and it’s incredible

tbh i'm still not certain what Kiryu gets up to in those love hotels

pulls out his hanafuda deck

gotta think that's the most likely option

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50NuiQGcrZc

^^love that.

Yakuza 4 atm, akiyama-san is my main man. Feels even cheesier than normal but I’m all about it. Majima up to some dirty. Not a whiff of the dragon of Dojima yet but we all know he’s on his way. Millions falling from the millennium towers. One of the worst hostess mini games of the series. All in all, I love every part of it.

Bout to find out what this Saejima guy is all about.

Damn saejima really up to no good either. What an intro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50NuiQGcrZc

I kind of want this to become a neverending youtube meme a la steamed hams

LMAO love it

I’m playing the new Kiryu game. Yakuza 6 spoilers: Even though Kiryu faked his own death at the end of Y6 people everywhere you go immediately recognise him, which isn’t surprising since he looks exactly the same bar a pair of glasses. Good that the Clark Kent trope doesn’t apply in Japan?
Very good so far, call backs to a lot of plot points from other series and games, koi-koi remains a great time drain when you’re too numb to do anything else.

ah shit it's out? i'm deep in baldur's gate.

Gamepass too. Trying to speed through 4-6 rn to get to it while it's hot

it's on my wishlist but given current circs i'm more likely to end up playing Infinite Wealth before i get round to this one

wow I couldn't imagine doing that, Yakuza is so much about getting lost in the world and just hanging out

xpost

ah shit it's out? i'm deep in baldur's gate.

i will never stop trying to hit on cabaret hostesses

there was some dodgy live action footage in Inshin as well

I haven’t actually finished that cos I went from Ishin to Mario Wonder, I’m terrible for that kind of shit, but I will do so

Oh god yeah there's the Mario too. Too many games!

Yeah I did finish that, btw I really enjoy glasses Kiryu being hilariously reminiscent of glasses Kiryu in 0

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-O_Ofna8AA92Ei?format=jpg&name=900x900

He still comes out with the same dumb shit he always does but he’s got glasses

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyIOQ1PWAAAgCk_?format=jpg&name=large

wow I couldn't imagine doing that, Yakuza is so much about getting lost in the world and just hanging out

xpost

― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 13 November 2023 20:38 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've kind of accepted I'm playing these games "wrong" but I'm okay with it. Yakuza to me is pure pulp and screaming KIRYU-SAN at your screen whenever Kiryu does literally anything. I'm in it for the vibes, but I'm just not a minigame guy.

This is also turning into somewhat of a Nov/Dec tradition to plow through a couple while listening to end of year music lists. did 0 and kiwami 1 chrissy 2021, kiwami 2 and 3 2022, so gotta keep the pattern going!

New Kiryu game feels so...empty, so far.

How far in are you?

Very early days, I'm at the homeless camp.

It’s a little bit light feeling comparatively. But I’m not finished yet.

For all its wackiness, the two most hilarious things in Infinite Wealth for me are:

Kasuga sing shouting the instrumental melody line to Chi-chan's city pop song on karaoke

and

The little shot of Kasuga sitting down when you play mahjong with your crew, holding on the hopeful, oblivious grin of a guy who is def about to get completely fleeced.

i know it's reused from the previous game, but i love the animation that plays when kasuga fails a vocational school exam. such a likeable character, ichiban #1!

I'm playing them all in chronological order, to fill in the gaps in my knowledge and to refresh myself on who the fuck everyone is.

One thing about Kiwami 2 is Majima is basically being a gentrifier? Taking a park that belonged to the homeless and building some expensive apartments in there. Where did the homeless people go??

supercut of Kiryu soulfully saying the names of different characters after they've dropped some bombshell

Intercut with him growling the villainses names into the night sky when they've just done something villainous

All leading into a heartfelt karaoke performance

There is also this kind of thing where some important-to-the-plot location/ mysterious property developer etc is described to Kiryu for the first time and he very thoughtfully repeats it back so the player doesn't miss it

...Tachibana...Real Estate...? 🤔

Haha yes.

Having (re)played through the main series (currently at Like A Dragon), one thing I find very interesting is how consistently it is about mob justice, moral crusades, social media call outs without ever falling into anti-cancel culture screeds or reactionary beliefs - the victims of this stuff in Yakuza are sex workers or ex-criminals trying to make a honest living. I'm sure the cultural difference from the West plays a part but it's not like Japan hasn't had its metoo moments. Anyway kinda cool, there are occasional leftist attempts to point out that say ppl trying to ban drag queen storytime is cancel culture but usually in a "by your logic" way, this series just shows reactionaries using these tools and doesn't get into both sides-ism. I was really worried when I heard about the premise of Infinite Wealth and it turned out to be along these lines too.

I’d need to sit down and think about it across the games but the games have been progressive in their views in some ways and in others…not. But I do recall that they did talk about retooling some of the earlier games stuff re trans women and sex workers. I think the overall vibe of the series is that it’s the shadow world & iirc the yakuza in Japan have long been disproportionally comprised of people from various minority groups in the country. Not sure how true this is but it makes a lot of sense with how so many characters in the series are from minority backgrounds:

According to a 2006 speech by Mitsuhiro Suganuma, a former officer of the Public Security Intelligence Agency, around 60 percent of yakuza members come from burakumin, the descendants of a feudal outcast class and approximately 30 percent of them are Japanese-born Koreans, and only 10 percent are from non-burakumin Japanese and Chinese ethnic groups.

Similarly I really didn’t like that plot in the Kiwami remake where one of the girls you date is a lesbian and she wants to sleep with Kiryu to see if she likes men. To me I was like, ugh, are they really doing the “Just needs to meet the right man!” thing, but actually it was far more nuanced than that; they do sleep together but she was like, that was nice but I still like girls lol. It’s portrayed as her experimenting with a person she likes rather than falling into that trope, and it was a lot better for it.

Most of the police you meet are corrupt and the ones you meet who aren’t are openly marginalised by their colleagues; the government is on the take and doesn’t care about the concerns of ordinary people; the super rich will hurt anyone who gets in their way. In that world, how are you going to complain about or even care about Mama in the okama bar? We are all in the gutter together, the series seems to say. Oh, and if you own any land in Japan that might be valuable in any way you’re probably in danger lol.

OTM.

Certainly don't want to paint Yakuza as blanket progressive, it's just if you had subplots about social media hate campaigns in a piece of Western media the target would inevitably be someone accused of sexual offenses or being racist and the series never ever resorts to that (nb there may be some substories I haven't explored).

Similarly I really didn’t like that plot in the Kiwami remake where one of the girls you date is a lesbian and she wants to sleep with Kiryu to see if she likes men. To me I was like, ugh, are they really doing the “Just needs to meet the right man!” thing, but actually it was far more nuanced than that; they do sleep together but she was like, that was nice but I still like girls lol. It’s portrayed as her experimenting with a person she likes rather than falling into that trope, and it was a lot better for it.

lol that subplot was so strange - iirc Kiryu's final lecture to the girl was that she was too hung up on ideas of gender, too obsessed with women conforming to her ideas of what is female, and so she kinda went "ok you're right let's have sex since I'm trying not to care about gender so much". Which, go off pansexual king, but until Kiryu starts frequenting host clubs as a client that's all big talk and no action imo.

You can’t tell me Kiryu and Nishiki never slept together at least once and that’s as far as I’m going with that. I did like that the plot of Mine being in love with Daigo is not remotely played for laughs or gay panic though.

Majima pirate game

https://www.ign.com/articles/majima-focused-like-a-dragon-pirate-yakuza-in-hawaii-announced-at-rgg-summit-as-next-yakuza-game

MAJIMA PIRATE GAME

Every time I think “this sounds dumb” as a spin off game it’s gold so


MAJIMA PIRATE GAME

(Re)playing all the entries in such quick succession really drives home that Kiryu's biggest flaw is his inability to accept help, there's so many moments where he tricks an ally so that he can go fight the Big Bad alone. Meanwhile Kasuga has absolute and total trust in his allies and derives his strength from believing in the power of friendship. It's kind of a beautiful evolution for the franchise.

it's great stuff lads